More on Biking for Gray Hairs

Kathy Imbriani June 29, 2008

Our first real mountain biking adventure was at a local park that had created advance, intermediate and beginner mountain bike trails. Our kids had warned us off all but the beginner trails. So, with jeans’ legs tied up with shoestrings, we set out. It’s amazing how fast trees can move. Even if you reach part of a trail with no trees, suddenly, there they are, taunting you to fit your handlebars between them. Hurtling through the woods, following a trail, more aptly described as a dim path, we found that riding around the parking lot bore absolutely no resemblance to this. Roots the size of wrestler’s arms lay right in the middle of the path. You avoid something like this, don’t you? No, the boys chimed when we related our first adventure. This is what mountain bikers live for! Roots! Preferably big, fat ones! You’ll learn to love them.

Love them we did not. But, eventually, we found a couple of trails that did not require dodging trees and rode these consistently and our flickers of confidence grew. Now, our sons decided, we were ready to do some “real” mountain biking. We met one of our sons at another trail, different, but still a beginner’s trail . . . or so they said.

We needed to ride faster, he instructed. Hit the roots with speed and you’ll bounce right over them. Pedal really hard around the twisty curves. Brake sharply on the hills, but don’t slide the tires. Don’t poke along on the trail looking for squirrels. Go! Go! Go!

He said we did surprisingly well for our first time. We came away with only a few scratched knuckles and one cracked rib. He said we kept our speed up really well, except for the times we were rooting around in the woods looking for all our parts after a spill. I didn’t tell him, but the only reason we stayed ahead of him was fear that if we hesitated, he’d run over us and extraction from all the twisted bike rubble would take the Jaws of Life and a few burly EMTs.

We still have our old bikes and we still ride at least twice a week on a variety of trails and greenways more to our liking (more about this in another post). Recently, one of those young, skinny, Clif bar eating children stopped us on the trail and oohed and aahed over my old, classic bike. “I had one just like that a long time ago,” he gushed. And then he went on to extol the virtues of this particular bike. Our boys do all our maintenance and, despite a little grumbling, we’ve decided that the boys like to do this. We think they just like to find out what type of mischief we’ve been up to lately. We don’t tell them that on a certain trail at a certain place, there’s the perfect downhill where we can lean back, poke our feet out in front and fly downhill with a heartfelt “Wheeeee”, our gray hair ruffling in the wind as our brand new bike computers register 30 mph.


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One Response to “More on Biking for Gray Hairs”

  1. More on biking for gray hairs on June 29th, 2008 1:06 am

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